


defiant acts of creation

by anarchetypal



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, References to Torture, demon shane with a twist, ryan is Trying but ultimately in over his head, sappy dialogue, sexual references in passing, shane is emotionally stunted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 20:57:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14004612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anarchetypal/pseuds/anarchetypal
Summary: Ryan finds out Shane is Not Traditionally of This World, and that’s— that’s fine, really, when it’s all said and done. Adult life is already so goddamn weird; Ryan feels like he’s prepared to let most anything roll off his back, so. Demons. Sure. As long as Shane’s not going to drag him to hell or eat his soul or whatever it is demons do, Ryan’s fine to keep working with him and having popcorn-and-movie nights with him and tumbling into bed with him.He’ll fuck a demon. Whatever.Except Shane says he’s not a demon.





	defiant acts of creation

Ryan finds out Shane is Not Traditionally of This World, and that’s— that’s fine, really, when it’s all said and done. Adult life is already so goddamn weird; Ryan feels like he’s prepared to let most anything roll off his back, so. Demons. Sure. As long as Shane’s not going to drag him to hell or eat his soul or whatever it is demons do, Ryan’s fine to keep working with him and having popcorn-and-movie nights with him and tumbling into bed with him.

He’ll fuck a demon. Whatever.

Except Shane says he’s not a demon.

It comes about when they’re lounging on Ryan’s couch one weeknight with some shitty b-grade action movie playing through Netflix, Shane actively trying to steal the majority of the blanket they’re sharing (“Hey, I don’t _care_ if you’re taller, it’s _my_ blanket, you shouldn’t get to take all of it just because you’re possessing some half-giant from Ohio”). It delves innocently enough into the realm of play-fighting when Ryan reaches out towards Shane, grabbing at the blanket with a pleading expression, and—

And Ryan must do something _wrong_ , because Shane suddenly flinches back so hard he nearly topples off the couch.

He throws his arms up like he’s protecting his eyes, or hiding Ryan from his view, and at first Ryan laughs, but then he sees the way Shane’s trembling finely all over. There’s fear radiating off him like a physical thing.

The second Shane realizes that 1) he’s fine, there’s no real danger, and 2) he just made himself look vulnerable, he closes off entirely. Throws the blanket to the floor and gets off the couch, starts looking for his shoes like he’s about to leave.

“Whoa, hey,” Ryan says, sitting up. “Where are you going? What was—?”

“Shut up,” Shane mutters, grabbing his phone from the coffee table.

“Can we talk about what just—?”

“No.”

“Shane—”

“ _ **No**_ **,** ” Shane snarls, and there’s a deep, otherworldly, growling timbre under his normal voice. If Ryan were anybody else, that’d scare him into submission, but he’s been dealing with Shane’s supernatural tantrums on and off for a few months now.

As it is, he just folds his arms over his chest. “Okay, so what I’m getting from that is this is _definitely_ something we’re going to have to talk about—”

“ _No_ ,” Shane repeats, but it’s less angry and more stubborn.

“Shane.” Ryan waits until Shane’s looking at him. Says, quietly, “Are you okay?”

Shane looks, all of a sudden, very tired. He sighs. “No.”

— —

Ryan manages to get Shane back on the couch and plies him with popcorn and soda and the _entire_ blanket until Shane relaxes enough to say, “So, I’m not a demon. But I did spend some time in hell.” Pauses. Adds, “It wasn’t...pleasant.”

Ryan can’t help but snort. “Uh, yeah. Wouldn’t expect it to be.”

Shane shifts, rubs the back of his neck. “No, I mean— it really— it was a punishment, it was a penance, it was— bad,” he says, voice getting quieter and quieter as he speaks, and Ryan has a lightswitch moment of recognizing the awkward understatement people make when they’re talking about real trauma.

And if Shane’s talking about _Hell_ , this probably isn’t some run-of-the-mill torture he’s referring to.

“Oh,” he breathes.

Shane immediately has his hackles raised. Snaps, “Don’t— get that pity off your face, Bergara, I _hate_ that shit— I get enough of that from _demons_ , I don’t need it from you, too—”

Ryan raises his hands in surrender. “Sorry, shit, I just—” he pauses. “Demons?” he repeats, a little incredulous, because how bad _was_ this, exactly?

He’s got enough of a roiling, twisting feeling in his stomach that he doesn’t ask for details, but there’s a part of him that wants to.

And there’s a part of him, sick and curious and hating it, that wants to ask _Why?_

Because what does someone have to do to get a punishment that makes _demons_ look at you in pity?

He doesn’t have to ask.

(He usually doesn’t. Shane says he can’t read minds, but he tends to read Ryan like a favorite, well-worn book, knowing the next line before it even comes.)

Shane’s clearly trying to get him to calm down, because he says, “I didn’t, you know, murder a thousand babies in cold blood or anything.”

Ryan manages a small smile.

“But I did pirate just, like, an _unbelievable_ amount of music off of LimeWire, and God doesn’t tend to take too kindly to that shit, so—”

Ryan snorts, rolling his eyes, and tosses a couch pillow at him.

There’s a wavering stretch of silence, and then Ryan says, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. That’s— it’s your business. But at least tell me what I did that freaked you out so bad. So I can...you know. Try not to do it again.”

The expression on Shane’s face is complicated.

“You didn’t do anything,” he says.

But that can’t be true, and Ryan argues as much.

Shane shuts his eyes— he does this a lot, in this specific, distinct way, like he’s shutting himself away from a memory or into one, Ryan can never tell. Like he’s somewhere else for a second. “You didn’t _do_ anything. You just— The way you were looking at me— Sometimes I look at you and it makes me remember—”

There are a lot of things Ryan wants to ask. _Where do you go when you’re sitting in front of me but you’re in another world? Who were you then if that’s not who you are now? Why does the dark in you seem so large when I know how bright the spark in your eyes can be?_

There are things Ryan wants to ask but he can’t find the right words.

What he ends up with, after fumbling from confusion to frustration to helplessness, is:

“What’d you do, Shane?”

Shane opens his eyes. “I wasn’t a demon,” he says. “Maybe that would’ve been better. There were angels, and the fallen angels that would become demons, and the humans— And sometimes there were other things that didn’t quite...fit. Not holy, but not damned, but not Human.”

“Then— what?”

Shane shrugs slightly. “If you were being polite, maybe you’d call me a minor god? If you _weren’t_ being polite—and most weren’t—you’d call me a mistake.”

Ryan can’t help it. “Being a minor god sounds pretty badass to me.”

That coaxes a smile from him. “Yeah, I guess it does. The free will of a human with the extra _oomph_ of an angel and none of the damnation of a demon. Triple threat, baby.”

“ _Baby_ ,” Ryan echoes, rolling his eyes.

Shane looks at him fondly, and then the smile fades. “Thing was, the angels and the humans, they had God, and even the demons, they had direction, they had purpose. And I had...me,” he says, like _just me_. “No purpose, no attention, no—love, and that was fine. For a while. I made my own fun. Was...a little bit of a trickster. Harmless stuff.”

“You?” says Ryan, eyes dramatically wide. “A trickster? No. I can’t believe it.”

Shane gives him a little grin, and Ryan can see centuries’ worth of mirth in his eyes.

Then he sighs, gaze drifting until he’s far away again. “Like I said, I made my own fun. And that was good, you know, that was fine. That was enough. And then it...wasn’t. I started thinking it wasn’t _fair_. I started getting jealous, even of the demons. But _especially_ the angels.”

Ryan’s almost afraid to pull Shane from the memories. “Why the angels?”

Shane smiles faintly. “The affection and care God has for His angels—there’s no love like that, Ryan. Not in the whole universe. There’s nothing that can compare to it.” He sighs. “I just...wanted to know what it was like.”

This doesn’t explain why Shane was punished, though—it seems understandable, harmless, even—so Ryan holds Shane’s gaze and waits.

“I thought I could make an angel of myself. Have that love for myself. Just a little bit, just for a little while.” He looks at Ryan and his expression is a roiling sea of emotion. “So I stole the halo off an angel.”

“You—you can _do_ that?”

“Yes. Technically.”

Ryan frowns. “Technically?” he repeats.

Shane shuts his eyes again. When they open, they’re filled with something so raw and poignant and piercing that Ryan thinks his bones will remember the ache of that look forever.

“I didn't know it would kill him,” Shane says, voice nearly at a whisper. “I swear I didn't. I thought— I thought it’d be harmless—”

“That kills them?” Ryan breathes, almost startled at the concept.

Shane nods, miserable. And Ryan learns that Shane tried to put it back. Once he realized. Tried to make things right but it was too _late_ and he was left screaming _no no no,_ _ **please!**_ as the angel reached out towards him fearfully, before turning all at once to stardust, and the halo burned up in his hands.

The penance in Hell, Shane tells him, was nothing compared to the punishment of watching the angel die.

He has nightmares. Remembers it constantly, in fine detail.

“So when you— I mean, I don’t wanna say you freaked out earlier,” Ryan says, wincing, “but—”

“No, it was, uh. Pretty much a textbook freakout.” Shane rubs the back of his neck. “But I’m serious, it wasn’t because of anything you did. You just… remind me of him, sometimes.”

“I do?”

“Not because you look the same.” Shane frowns faintly, rubbing the back of his neck in thought. “It’s more like… You know, angels were something to be revered. I’d look at them in...awe. And that’s—” Shane pauses. Goes slightly red at the tips of his ears. “Sometimes that’s how I look at you, too.”

Ryan stares, wide-eyed.

Shane raises his hands. “Not— not _exactly_ the same way. There's a difference between revering something because it's holy to God and revering something because it's holy to _you_.”

“What’s the difference?”

Shane smiles, rueful. “It hurts worse.”

Ryan’s frowning at him. “You’re still beating yourself up about it,” he says, because Shane clearly is. He’s wracked with guilt over it. “Even with all that— punishment, even with all the penance, you still feel guilty.”

Shane furrows his brow. “Of course I do.”

“ _Why?”_

“Because I—”

“But you didn’t _know!”_ Ryan says— maybe he shouts it, because he’s standing up now. “You didn’t know that would happen!”

 **"It doesn’t matter!”** and Shane’s standing, too. There’s something like electricity in the air, and somewhere something’s burning, Ryan’s sure of it. Shane’s standing and he towers over Ryan and he looks frustrated and furious and lost. “It d _oesn’t matter_. Because—because it didn’t matter _then_ , so why should it matter now? I tried to take something that wasn’t mine, I tried to take something I didn’t deserve—”

“The halo?”

“The love.”

Ryan stops.

Shane looks, all at once, like he’d rather be anywhere else in the universe. He collapses back onto the couch, the electricity dissipating from the air, all grandeur forgotten. Ryan’s not sure if it’s an insult to say it, but Shane looks very...human in this moment. Tired, messy-haired, staring up at the ceiling like he could rise up through it and just disappear.

“Sorry,” he says finally. Ryan raises his eyebrows in surprise, sitting back down, but Shane hasn’t looked away from the ceiling. “Didn’t mean to get all—” He gestures vaguely, laughs without much humor. “Emo and dramatic.”

“You’re not being dramatic,” Ryan says.

Shane glances over. “Just emo?”

Ryan smiles faintly. “Maybe a little. Thirteen year old in a goth phase.”

That coaxes a grin from him. “Gonna start shopping at Hot Topic. Just you wait.”

Ryan throws an arm over his eyes in mock-horror. “Oh, god, no. I’ve never been less attracted to you.”

“Gonna start wearing Tripp pants.”

Ryan groans. “You’ve given me the Anti Boner. I may never get hard again.” He stares down at his lap forlornly.

Shane’s laughing now, gathers up the blanket and tosses it in Ryan’s direction. “My bad.”

They settle into a content enough silence, Ryan smoothing the blanket out until they’re mostly sharing it between them, and lets the quiet stretch until he can’t help but say something, too uncomfortable to leave things where they are.

“Not to make things weird or sappy, but.” He pauses, trying to find the right words. “You know you deserve love, right?”

Shane shifts. “Ryan—”

“Like, I fucking— You’re my best friend, okay, and I—” He hesitates, takes a breath. “I love you, alright, and I care about you, and you don’t get any choice about that. I love you and you’re gonna have to deal with it. I love you, so— so there.” It comes out perhaps a little more petulant than he’d envisioned.

Shane is smiling. “So there?”

“You have to let it go.”

Shane stops smiling. “Ryan.”

But he’s getting worked up now, steamrolls forward. “Or not even just let it go. You have to forgive yourself. Okay? Because it’s fucking eating you alive. I can see it.”

“It’s not that simple.” There’s an electricity in the air again, a portent of danger, but Ryan can’t stop.

“Maybe it _should_ be!”

The energy falters and drops with the confused expression forming on Shane’s face.

Ryan presses on. “You were punished—you were fucking _tortured_ for so long it made you think you don’t deserve forgiveness, or fucking _love—_ Maybe it’s not supposed to be that way. Maybe everybody making the rules up there is _wrong_. Who’s to say what’s right, anyway? You made a mistake.”

“I _killed—_ ”

“ _You made a mistake_ ,” Ryan repeats, “and you paid for it a thousand times over and then you got dropped back on earth with no guidance. You said it yourself— you have no idea what you are or who you’re supposed to be. That sounds like a pretty shitty way to run things.”

“It’s just—” Shane looks frustrated. “When angels fall from grace, they become demons. If you don’t have any grace to fall from, but you fall anyway, what do you become?”

Ryan lets the question hang in the air for a moment. Then he shrugs. “Whatever you want to be,” he says.

Shane smiles ruefully. “Not gonna lie. That’s pretty terrifying.”

“I mean,” Ryan says, “for now, you can just be ‘Shane, resident long-legged weirdo.’”

“I dunno,” Shane temporizes, but he’s looking more and more—maybe not at peace, but getting there—by the minute. “Sounds like kind of a loser.”

It’s not going to be an easy journey, Ryan knows, but there’s no more dangerous energy in the air, and the fire’s gone from Shane’s eyes.

“Oh, he is.” Ryan shifts, gathering the blanket as he moves across the couch to lean against him. “But I think I like him.”

Shane lifts his arm to accommodate Ryan automatically. He's quiet for a moment, then smiles again, but it’s genuine this time. “I think I might be starting to like him, too.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> i've got a writing/inspiration blog if you do the tumblr thing: http://anarchetypal.tumblr.com/


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